Let the Transformation Begin: What’s NEXT for NET
NEW LEADERSHIP MODEL
NEW GOVERNANCE/BOARD MODEL
NEW STAFF STRUCTURE
WHERE THIS LEAVES US
NEW MEMBERSHIP ENGAGEMENT
THE FUTURE BEGINS NOW
For the past two years, NET’s staff, Board, and Bridge Ensemble have worked with members of the NET community on plans to re-activate and transform the ensemble arts community, as well as NET itself. The planning phase of this process, NETneXt, is now at an end.
We’re writing to let you know what that planning process has yielded and where we’re going. As NET heads into a changed, hopeful, and uncertain future at the start of our new fiscal year on July 1, we’re asking you to chart that course with us.
1. NEW LEADERSHIP MODEL
One of NETneXt’s explicit goals was to realize our years-long aspiration that NET’s organizational structure embody our ensemble values of shared power and lateral leadership.
This would mean dismantling the traditional roles of Executive Director and administrative staff that had evolved over the past fifteen years. The establishment in Fall 2022 of an eight-member “Bridge Ensemble” to design and oversee the transformative NETneXt process was the first step along the way.
The good—and hard—news is that we are ready to make that leap.
What this means is that NET’s Executive Director Alisha Tonsic, the person most instrumental in envisioning and initiating the NETneXt process—and most vocal in pushing for this structural change from a single to a shared leadership model resembling a true ensemble—will be leaving NET at the end of June.
Alisha has been a leading light in this community since she first came to NET as Board Treasurer (2006-09). She joined the staff as Operations & Resources Coordinator in 2009 and served as Managing Director alongside NET’s first Executive Director Mark Valdez from 2011-15. Upon Mark’s departure, the NET Board collapsed these two existing positions into one (intended as a temporary shift from co-leadership structure, due to persistent financial challenges), and named Alisha as NET’s new Executive Director.
Alisha has continued to lead NET since then, including guiding us through the pandemic and into this transformative moment. Alisha’s departure is a momentous change for NET—and for the ensemble field as a whole—and we will more fully celebrate her seminal leadership elsewhere, including in virtual and in-person gatherings. For now, we’ll just say we never would have made it through recent years without her. Carrying out her expressed imperative to transform NET into an entity without a single executive staff leader—without her—is a bittersweet, complicated accomplishment.
2. NEW GOVERNANCE/BOARD MODEL
As with NET’s administrative structure, our governance model has evolved in the nearly three decades since our founding by the Network’s eight original ensembles.
As we transform our administration, we will also be remaking the Board into a working group more directly engaged in the organization’s activities and operations—and more closely resembling that of NET’s origins. Though NET’s Board has long been a diverse, loving team of devoted colleagues from within our community of ensembles and ensemble artists, we want to go further towards melding governance and participatory community in the leadership structure of NET. As we seek an even more radically inclusive and effective model, we will explore alternative structures truer to the nature of ensemble and free of the foundational inequities baked into the usual structures of nonprofit governance.
3. NEW STAFF STRUCTURE
Our goal with all this restructuring is simple: to eliminate hierarchy in our practices and return to the “by us, for us” ethos that gave birth to this Network. One of the biggest findings of NETneXt was that the organizational structure of NET had created a growing gap between our goal of being a member-led coalition and the reality that we were increasingly looked to as an administrative service organization and, then, with the impactful NET/TEN program, as a funding source. Through it all, we relied on a tiny, but mighty staff—two or three full-timers with a few part-time contractors—to serve everyone and hold this sizable organization together.
As we move toward a more activated, member-driven model, we are, in addition to eliminating the position of Executive Director and reimagining our Board, dismantling the staff structure as we’ve known it. While this has led us to change or end some of our outside contracts and will, in the long run, mean the overhaul of many of our financial, technical, and communication/ engagement practices, right now it means another sad, difficult goodbye.
At the end of June, our longtime Finance & Operations Manager, Nicole Shero, will also be leaving after seven extraordinary years of service. During these years, Nicole has held NET’s operations together with precision and care, handling day-to-day transactions, correspondence, finances, membership data, grant management and just about everything else, often as the single administrator working alongside Alisha.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
We have more to say about the state of NET’s finances during this transition/transformation (below) but we want you to know this: The current NET Board—in concert with the remaining five members of the Bridge Ensemble—have committed to prioritize financial support of Alisha and Nicole through this difficult transition, putting their compensation and care above all other ongoing and future obligations and ensuring that the bulk of our current resources will go toward these final paychecks as well as severance pay to carry them through the summer. This (and so much more) is what they deserve. To that end, those members of the Bridge Ensemble and Board continuing the work to achieve this transformation in the immediate months ahead will do that work with compensation deferred, as we seek additional future funding support.
4. WHERE THIS LEAVES US:
The hard truth of NET now is this: We currently lack the financial and human resources we need to fully achieve this transformation. We have pending grant and recoverable grant proposals and are continuing to fundraise. Like many of our colleague service organizations— “intermediaries” in the common parlance—we are actively working to persuade funders to continue (or begin) supporting connective groups like NET. As priorities within the funding community shift, we need to keep shining light on the value of collective efforts and the way networks like ours “raise all the ships” within them. This field-wide case-making is crucial to the future of the ensemble community, and we will need you with us as we advocate.
We will soon launch a new Member Portal for active engagement, information, and connection, as well as clear guidelines for membership fees and offerings (see more below). We will appeal to our own community for financial support and to build a solidarity economy cushion for the changes in traditional funding.
This is long-term work, and our vision is a long-term, evolutionary vision. As we go, we continue to push for change and an activated community of ensemble companies and artists. And here’s how we will do that together…
5. NEW MEMBERSHIP ENGAGEMENT MODEL
By now you’ve discovered that this missive contains both news and an invitation. That invitation—the first of many—is for more direct member involvement, including in NET’s day-to-day plans and operations. In this new era, we will build a changed membership model—integral to our evolving Leadership/Board/Staff structures—aimed at more directly empowering and engaging members of the NET community with each other and with the workings of the Network as a whole.
Overseeing this radical transformation (which is also a return to NET’s roots) is an ongoing contingent of current members of the Bridge Ensemble—Severin Blake, Alex Meda, and Rad Pereira—and of the NET Board, under the leadership of co-chair Leslie Tamaribuchi. These four artist-administrators and members of the current Board (Claudia Alick, co-chair Shoshana Bass, Jonathan Clark, Carrie J. Cole, Carlos Alexis Cruz, Alison De La Cruz, Dipankar Mukerjee, Gerard Stropnicky) have been preparing this transition over the past two years, and they will be guiding us through the next phase of transformation. So if you’re wondering, “Who’s home at NET?” The answer is: Severin, Alex, Rad, Leslie, and more.
And if you’re unclear about “Who’s invited to engage with and lead the Future NET?” The answer is YOU. The answer is US: Every ensemble across the arts, everyone working in those ensembles or with the values of ensemble-based practice in their hearts.
6. THE FUTURE BEGINS NOW
We are starting the NETneXt implementation with small gatherings—online and in-person (always with hybrid options for increased access)—to map the field and its collective assets. We will begin with two regional/hybrid gatherings in Los Angeles and New York City to develop and share a new operating plan that contains opportunities to connect, exchange ideas and resources, advocate for the field, and maintain access to updated information pertinent to our community.
We will invite participation in the leadership and ongoing operations of NET, based on principles of mutual aid and solidarity economies. We will expand opportunities for shared, rotating, and staggered leadership that also allows new and rising leaders access to professional development.
Look for news of our new Member Portal, which will follow soon after this announcement. There you’ll find a Calendar of Connectivity with upcoming Events & Programs, resources for Collaborative Advocacy, materials for the Exchange of Ideas & Resources, and a list of Monthly Newsletters & Member Mailings.
In the mid-1990s, a group of theater ensembles—including A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Cornerstone Theater Company, Dell'Arte International, Independent Eye, Irondale Ensemble Project, The Road Company, and Touchstone Theatre—came together to build an extended community of artists with like-minded values and not feel so alone, embodying “the antithesis of the corporate model that dominates the theatrical landscape in America today.” They created the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET).
That was 28 years ago. So much has happened in the life of NET since then, and so much more change has occurred in the two years since NETneXt was launched. NET’s founding moment began with an invitation—to other ensemble companies and artists from across the country—to join, to build together. Today we’re extending that same invitation. There’s more to do, more to learn, more to create, activate, exchange, chronicle, and explore. We know that ensemble work is as much about the process as the destination: about who takes the journey with you, and the choices you make together along the way.
The path ahead for NET will be an experiment, bumpy and uncertain and—we hope—full of discovery. Let’s walk it together.
Excerpted from MANIFESTO, Network of Ensemble Theaters, NET Steering Committee, 2003-2006:
“Some ensembles create original work; others work interpretively or with adaptations. Some ensembles are rooted in the community, whether that community is geographic, intellectual, aesthetic, or ethnic. Other ensembles consciously stand apart from the community in order to critique and provoke. All of us create theater that is meaningful to each member and to our diverse audiences. We prize most highly the benefits that arise from artists working together over extended periods of time.
The most unique aspect of our work is that the primary decision-making power rests in the hands of the artists. Ensemble theater is the antithesis of the corporate model that dominates the theatrical landscape in America today. Our resources are dedicated to supporting artists and the artistic process.”